AROUND CITY HALL had contInued. By far the most in- fluential press coverage was in the Village Voice in April of this year. It included much of the evidence that subsequently reapp.eared in the D.O.!. report-and, indeed, led to the Mayor's request to the D.O.!. to investigate what had gone on. "THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKlNG MAYOR" was the Voice's front-page headline the week after the report came out, and the paper was delighted to reprint an ex- change at a City Hall press conference in which Joan Shepard, of the City Sun, a black-owned paper in Brooklyn, asked the Mayor "Do you have to read the Vil- lage Voice to find out what is going on at City Hall?" and Dinkins angrily re- sponded, "I am not required to read the Village Voice to find out what goes on at City Hall." In fact, each of the summer's long reports on the governIng process at the Dinkins City Hall portrayed the Mayor as inattentive to the point of be- ing disengaged when leadership was badly needed, or, as a Post headline put it after the Crown Heights report, "OUT TO LUNCH!" " M AYOR DAVID N. DINKlNS had a bad week. He's also had a bad month. In fact, he's had a pretty bad year, and even his friends agree that he badly needs a couple of weeks of favorable breaks-and soon-if he is to avoid the worst break of all: defeat on Nov. 2nd" was the lead paragraph of a front-page Times story by Todd Purdum on Au- gust 22nd. According to Purdum, the political consensus was that "the race for mayor might well be Rudolph W. Giuliani's to lose." The headline over the story in the first edition was apparently by a headline writer sympathetic to the Mayor, whose daily message at City Hall is that whatever untoward thing happens to him is certainly not the result of any inadequacies of his own. (When he announced, in discussing the city's failures in Crown Heights, "The buck stops here," he acknowledged that the Police Department had made many mis- takes, and explained that his only mis- take was in trusting what the police had said.) The fust edition described him as the "HARD-LUCK MAYOR," but a later edition made it "TROUBLED." In the next issue of the Amsterdam News, Dinkins' good friend Wilbert Tatum, who is its publisher and editor-in-chief, pro- nounced the Times article "gibberish" and denounced 'White-think," which, . ...... '" ( , . .'... ' , t>::> ,, .::-'...: ,i trl. &. r, I[ f 1 . < :' '... :i!t ... . .. j' i. : :" " t\ .; ),' ..... .. ..... )- '", . f -.< '" t ' \ r ... " '" . s ... - 'iI( , t ^ \\ ',} - l. \' - r ' 'P" """"!" ..:.,.,'.' ' "', 'ø,; : ' ^, P, ,%:' - -:' ;'" ",": :, (:: ,:' ::'.::"'.;. ,';: , ,f !< lt .to 49 í " I i, . ï,' . 'II ., . )"o':/> é : 3t ,;' " "..( >,:" , ,>"i : t ! 4 . J;: "j1 Þ -.w r J "..: *= .........'" t' . - f - -:' .,<-: '*' . " ," <, ,^ *'. ,6,',. . '*# I" "" '.' . :,:-'.:..-..,... <'< t' ...... ........ ..:v:";:..x- . .l t' WV)$.. ,' .. '6 , f#^ " 4: :'1 ,$I:' ' /' -f .'.. <"', t..",: " , "" ..: i f-", . - "'" , ^ t 'l . ......, ; '\'< .. tÆ ' t ì '\ ..-r '< :to . ". ... - <<t-. p"", "^ "", " > W*,' . t';<;.,. .," .',& p" J..f. " "My sense of humor needs bringing up to date. Do you think the New School might have something?" . Tatum said, holds that "no Black is competent to run this city." Four years ago, many New Yorkers who voted for Dinkins did so in the hope that he would be able to bring to- gether the residents of a city torn by bit- ter racial divisions. If polls are any indi- cation, it has not worked out that way. In the recent Harris poll, sixty-eight per cent of the whites in the survey said they were for Giuliani and twenty-two per cent for Dinkins. Of the blacks surveyed, eighty-seven per cent were for Dinkins and eight per cent for Giuliani. These numbers, reflecting a city sharply, even adamantly, divided by race, made Dinkins' campaign slogan-"One city One future"-seem, though wel1 in- tended, out of touch with reality. In 1989, Hispanics, who, like blacks, ac- count for about a quarter of New York's population, but whose percentage of the vote, because of their relative youth and lack of citizenship, is much less-per- haps fifteen per cent-gave Dinkins close to seventy per cent of their vote and, along with liberal-minded white voters, including Jews, swung the elec- tion to Dinkins. In the Harris survey, . Hispanics, who often complain that the Mayor favors his fellow-blacks, gave Dinkins only thirty-nine per cent, to fifty-twu per cent for Giuliani. In a fur- ther blow, on August 30th Carlos Rivera, Dinkins' fire commissioner, who is Puerto Rican, and whom the Mayor has often cited as an example of his el- evation of Latinos to high office, re- signed to become a leading adviser to Giuliani, saying that top mayoral aides had made decisions that endangered the safety of firefighters and the people of the city, and that they "tend to treat Hispanics with disdain and disrespect." Dinkins said that Rivera's decision to support Giuliani over him was "bizarre," and proof that the fire commissioner was a "very troubled" man. As he is well aware, it doesn't take too many Republican- voting Hispanics, along with disaffected whites, to add up to more than forty- seven thousand-his margin of victory four years ago. If Dinkins should lose, he would be the first Mrican-American mayor of a major American city to be defeated after a first term. Dinkins maintained that the Harris-poll results didn't bother him at